Archive for 'Shabbat'
Page 76
May 11, 2012 by Herzl Camp Admin, under General Posts, Letters from Staff, Music, Shabbat.
By: Flip Frisch, 2012 Shira Coach
I’m so old school that I still think recordings of song session are a novelty. In my day, once those songs were played and the lights went back on, they were over for good. A sweet but vague memory filed away with all the other ones from your shabbat, your summer, your childhood. Now with the press of a button you can bring back each song, exactly as it sounded at that point in time. Last summer as I sat with some campers eating their last breakfast before getting on the bus for home, Andrew Grone put on a “Leaving on a Jet Plane” compilation. He smiled at me and said that one track might sound familiar. Soon we were listening to a version of the song Bryan Grone and I recorded in that very spot nine years earlier. It was amazing. It was weird.
Thanks to modern technology, you can plan a summer from different places around the world. Louie Sloven, Yonatan Dotan and I recently had a meeting via 3-way Skype call. The hardest part was trying to schedule it for our three time-zones. Yonatan and I are so excited for the summer, we’ve been emailing each other songs since last August.
So we decided to take it one step further. What if we recorded a song together, 6000 miles apart?
First, using a laptop, Yonatan recorded himself singing and playing piano in Jerusalem. He may or may not have climbed through a window to reach the piano…I’ll never tell. Then he emailed tracks to me, and I took them to my brother’s house in Portland, Oregon (Tom Frisch, Kadimah ‘89). In his basement recording studio we played around with the tracks, added guitar and then more vocals. Thanks to a little studio magic we were able to make it sound (almost exactly) like we were playing together. When Yonatan wrote back to say he liked it, he was already in India. Now we’ve sent it to Anna Simon in Minneapolis, and you’re reading this wherever you are. The whole process took 4 days.
Simply by sending bits of information across the world we were able to be together, in song.
So light some candles, sit across from someone you like, and click here to listen to our version of Debbie Friedman’s z”l: T’filat Haderech. Wherever you find yourself tonight, see if you can meet us in the Chadar one last time.
Shabbat Shalom.